Telephone users are increasingly vulnerable to frauds perpetrated during phone calls. Scammers may pose as agents of trusted institutions, as officials in positions of authority, or representatives of large companies that conduct business with substantial portions of the population. Using these and other social engineering techniques, scammers may persuade their targets to provide personal information, passwords, credit card details, and so forth, paving the way for financial theft, identity theft, or even digital extortion. Unfortunately, many telephone users are unaware of or otherwise unequipped to deal with fraudulent calls. Many telephone users may be inclined to defer to practiced and authoritative sounding scammers.
Traditional approaches to address unwanted calls may both inconvenience telephone users and fail to provide adequate protection. For example, aggressive filtering of incoming calls based on whitelists may prevent telephone users from receiving legitimate—and sometimes important and expected—calls. Filtering of incoming calls based on blacklists may result in some false positives as phone numbers are recycled and may result in many false negatives as scammers quickly change or mask their phone numbers. By the time a phone number has been blacklisted, many people may have already been scammed, while many others may immediately receive calls from the same scammers under different phone numbers. In addition, some scammers have become more sophisticated, using some publicly available personal information (e.g., via social media and other Internet sources) to target their attacks, thereby reducing the call volume needed for a successful scam.
The instant disclosure, therefore, identifies and addresses a need for systems and methods for detecting illegitimate voice calls.